Saturday, September 10, 2016

Dark secret, 2016

DARK
SECRET, a public art intervention, addresses the deep silence that exists in
our society with regards to sexual violence. Statistics of
sexual assault and rape from around the world are alarming and only a fraction
of these acts of violence are reported to the police. Victims and
survivors offer different reasons for their reluctance to approach an authority
to report this most personal of crimes – fear, mistrust, shame, guilt, pain.
All over the world, these invasive assaults take place without outcry, hidden
under the weight of hundreds of years of patriarchy.

DARK
SECRET brings to the streets this secret kept in our societies, the secret of a
terrible violence against women through the act of the rape and assault.

The first public presentation of this piece
was performed in Spain and denounced the 1289 reported rapes that take place in
the country every year. Men and women went into the streets and silently held
together 1289 pieces of underwear.

In
October 2016, DARK SECRET will travel to Toronto, Canada. The
silence will be broken, a quiet stoic rebellion that invites the public,
allowing them to look and to deal with this old and terrible form of violence.

Through this hanging action we appreciate that the statistics often
does not show the reality of the number. In this opportunity, we will
hang 1890 underwear, the number of sexual assaults reported annually.

rosa
mesa was born in Canary Islands and moved to
Toronto in 1996 where she studied at the OCAD graduating in 2002. Her work has
been exhibited in Spain, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Cuba, Canada, Brasil,
Serbia, Germany, France and Switzerland.

Considered a multidisciplinary artist,
her works move between installations,
performance and public interventions. Her pieces are a response to her
surroundings that become dissected and reconstructed in a new narrative that
exposes whatever that triggers her in amusement or disgust. She has an interest
in drawing as a medium of communication that is less charge than painting and
her practice is often based in an observant and humoristic approach. She
explores areas of semiotics and the art practice, identity, nomadism,
migration, feminism and the hybrid and
changing state of contemporary culture. Starting from the point of considering
the increasing aesthetization of life, where the object is send toward
consumerism, the actions become a way to rebel against the absolute domination
of economical value. Meaning, significance and other type of values are in
jeopardy. She can be consider a socially engaged artist. She is a member of
daily services and art platform based in Berlin. Since 2004 rosa works between
Spain, Canada, Germany and Switzerland where she has been doing several art residencies. Today
she lives in Las Palmas, Spain.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

rosa mesa was born in Canary Islands and immigrate to Toronto, Canada in 1995. In 1996 she started her studies at the OCAD graduating in 2002. She has lived in Kenia, the West Indies, Thailand, Canada, Spain, Switzerland and Germany having presently her base of work in Europe.

rosa is a multidisplinary artist whose practice extend to installations, performance, video and public interventions. Her works are a response to her surroundings that become dissected and reconstructed in a new narrative that exposes whatever that triggers her in amusement or disgust.

Her practice takes often an observant and humoristic approach. Her pieces explore areas of semiotics and the art practice, identity, nomadism, migration, feminism and the hybrid and changing state of contemporary culture. In the last years her practice of performance in the public spaces has began to develop toward what she choses to describe as social engaged art defining it as an art practice that believes that art is a motor for social chance as it creates spaces of debate, creativity and health.

Today her work covers video and sound explorations, drawing, performance and public interventions.

rosa mesa has worked with the german artist Thomas Proffe since 2005 and they get together every year to work in projects often in the realm of installations and public interventions. Through these encounters the artists search for enriching their practice through collaborative works as well as to explore the multidisciplinary art practice.

rosa mesa is also since 2010 and with the colombian artist Maria Linares part of the daily services art platform, a Berlin project based on the exploration of the artist in the public spaces and in conection to the diverse social issues that affect todays contemporary art culture.

rosa mesa´s interests have today a lot to do with what she consideres an emergency state of thought and her works are in continual search of new ways to deal with a ever-mutating contemporary culture. She abandoned formal approaches to the art, keeping only a little space to deal with her adiction to drawing that it gets transformed more and more in mural pieces of ephimeral character.

rosa mesa her work as aperformer is charectirized by not rehersal and not repetition of the pieces in a more than probable futile attemp to scape the object.

Her interest in reaching the audience is also explore mainly through the performance and public intervention mediums, she has also created several blog projects to contact with the internet world.

PARTICIPATE

- You can participate each last wednesday of the month in the project Habalndo con Pepa, as an invited artist or as a lawyer. The project take place at Parque Santa Catalina, from 5 to 8 pm. www.daliservices.net